I've had my BB-AI a couple weeks, and I'm running from the on board eMMC with debian 9.9 just fine, The tidl examples work. But I wanted to flash the newer 'buster' image. It does not work. I read all the good advice from here:

I tried 3 different images downloaded. I tried 4 different SD cards, one 8 GB (no name brand), one 16 GB (PNY brand), two 32 GB (both Kingston brand). Used balena etcher, linux dd, win32 flasher. All said they were successful but nothing would boot on my BB-AI. OK I said, the good people on e14 will ask me a bunch of questions, what do I need to do to be ready? OK, I should read the boot messages on the serial debug UART. . . .

Great but I don't have a JST-ZH cable, and it'll take a while to get one. So I pulled apart what I had, an old CD-ROM to sound card cable, hot glued the loose sockets together at something close to the required 1.5mm pitch and plug it into my FTDI board. Amazingly it worked.

Now for my question, do I have a bad board? I see voltage errors in the debug messages. I did switch power supplies. I was using a generic USB-C 3 amp power supply, so I tried my raspberry Pi 4 official 3 amp power supply, same errors on boot up. Do I have a damaged SD slot?

Although I too seem to have got that Failed optimized voltage match message, it isn't repeating for me. Weird problem : (

I couldn't get the BB-AI to start up with a generic supply, but the Pi 4 supply seems to work fine for me. I don't have anything else connected though, so it may be worth trying with any USB attachments disconnected, in case something else is consuming power.

Other than that, I'm not sure what the issue could be. You're at the login prompt according to the output, so is that with the eMMC?

For my BB-AI, I'm using the eMMC Flash, not a micro SD card, mainly because the eMMC Flash is large (16GByte) compared to the older BeagleBone Black (for the BBB I used a micro SD card, since it had just 4GB eMMC).

You appear to have it booted (due to the console output), is it because you've re-flashed the old image?

Could you link to the exact images you've tried?

Christopher,

Yes, I will be more clear. "It does not work" means: booting from the micro SD card slot does not work.

Yes, I have booted and can read my serial console output. As I know you know, the BB-AI has built in eMMC memory, and I boot from that. Beagleboard was kind enough to flash debian stretch with LXQT from the factory and it works fine. But I do want to be able to flash newer debian images, choose IoT images some times.

Used balena etcher, linux dd, win32 flasher. All said they were successful but nothing would boot on my BB-AI.

The balena etcher can handle the .xz file directly. For the others, I just used the linux "unxz" command to get the .img file.

After doing much searching, I found this gem from RCN (beaglebone expert) over on a competitors forum, which showed the "voltage select" message. They're discussing a BBB instead of BB-AI, but the problem is similar. Kind of what I expected, and it'll be sad if I damaged my BB-AI

Beaglebone black occasionally reboots after sending the following message during booting.

I've had my BB-AI a couple weeks, and I'm running from the on board eMMC with debian 9.9 just fine, The tidl examples work. But I wanted to flash the newer 'buster' image. It does not work. I read all the good advice from here:

I tried 3 different images downloaded. I tried 4 different SD cards, one 8 GB (no name brand), one 16 GB (PNY brand), two 32 GB (both Kingston brand). Used balena etcher, linux dd, win32 flasher. All said they were successful but nothing would boot on my BB-AI. OK I said, the good people on e14 will ask me a bunch of questions, what do I need to do to be ready? OK, I should read the boot messages on the serial debug UART. . . .

Great but I don't have a JST-ZH cable, and it'll take a while to get one. So I pulled apart what I had, an old CD-ROM to sound card cable, hot glued the loose sockets together at something close to the required 1.5mm pitch and plug it into my FTDI board. Amazingly it worked.

Now for my question, do I have a bad board? I see voltage errors in the debug messages. I did switch power supplies. I was using a generic USB-C 3 amp power supply, so I tried my raspberry Pi 4 official 3 amp power supply, same errors on boot up. Do I have a damaged SD slot?